Organizational anomie as moderator of the relationship between an unfavorable attitudinal environment and citizenship behavior (OCB). An empirical study among university administration and services personnel
| Date | 25 September 2007 |
| Published date | 25 September 2007 |
| Pages | 843-866 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480710822391 |
| Author | Pablo Zoghbi Manrique de Lara,Tomás F. Espino Rodríguez |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Organizational anomie as
moderator of the relationship
between an unfavorable
attitudinal environment and
citizenship behavior (OCB)
An empirical study among university
administration and services personnel
Pablo Zoghbi Manrique de Lara and Toma
´s F. Espino Rodrı
´guez
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between an unfavorable
attitudinal environment and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The proposed model suggests
that organizational anomie (OA) acts as a moderator of that link, and thus OA interacts with
unfavorable attitudes and OCB by tightening their theoretical negative association.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 154 of the 758 non-teaching staff at a
Spanish public university. Accessibility of individual e-mail accounts was similar for all employees.
E-mails asking for collaboration were sent in two phases. A questionnaire was posted on the
university intranet and could be accessed by clicking on a link in the e-mails.
Findings – Multiple hierarchical regression results support the moderating role of OA of the
unfavorable attitude-OCB link because the unfavorable attitudes toward co-workers and toward the
boss as-a-person among employees with low, compared with high OA, have a stronger negative
relationship with OCB. OA moderation existed, but to varying degrees, between attitude toward one’s
job and some dimensions of OCB (OCBI, and OCBI client). OA also intensified the unpredicted positive
relationship between attitude toward boss’s performance and OCB. No moderating influences were
observed in the case of attitudes toward oneself and toward clients (students).
Research limitations/implications – The researched employees have job conditions inherent to
the peculiarities of the public sector which may limit the ability to extrapolate the findings in the
private sector. Findings provide a more understandable mechanism of the influence of attitudes on
OCB. The research may aid OA acceptance into organizations, providing an explicit justification for
the OA distinctiveness with other variables in the existing OB literature.
Practical implications – The findings contribute to a better understanding of the attitudes-OCB
link, and the ways to favor OCB through OA.
Originality/value – The use of OA as a moderator on this link is unprecedented.
Keywords Employee attitudes,Leadership, Public sector organizations, Spain
Paper type Research paper
In the last decade, non-task behaviors, or those not recognized in the job related tasks,
both in the positivepole, organizational citizenshipbehavior (OCB), and the negative one,
deviant workplace behaviors (DWB), have increasingly become the object of analysis
and explanation in the literature on organizational behavior (OB), and of promotion
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Organizational
anomie
843
Received May 2005
Revised July 2005
Accepted March 2006
Personnel Review
Vol. 36 No. 6, 2007
pp. 843-866
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480710822391
and/or control from the human resources management (HRM) perspective (Griffin et al.,
1998). That interest is probably due to the also increasing evidence of its influence on
overall job performance, or its use as an indicator of a quality and efficient performance
(Blancero et al., 1995; Morrison, 1996; Bell and Mengu
¨c¸, 2002; Kim et al., 2004).
The influence on OCB exerted by the employees’ evaluative perceptions, or
attitudes, to determined elements of their organizational environment is a widely
researched topic in the literature. Th eir perceptive-evaluative view s of their
organization, especially in terms of how fair they perceive its treatment, are shown
as a very influential factor widely supported in the literature (Farth et al., 1990;
Moorman, 1991; Niehoff and Moorman, 1993; Moorman et al., 1993; Konovsky and
Pugh, 1994). The same can be said about attitudes toward the leadership (Zellars et al.,
2002; Tepper and Taylor, 2003); toward work groups and co-workers (Griffin et al.,
1998; Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly, 1998; Bommer et al., 2003); and toward one’s self
(Kaplan, 1976). The influence of other attitudes toward other elements of the work
context has also been studied as part of more general attitudinal models, although they
have received somewhat less attention (e.g. Diefendorff et al., 2002).
Hodson (1999, p. 299) states that anomic organizations “are those that fail to meet a
minimum set of common workplace norms.” Bass (1990, p. 915) mentions the
usefulness of anomie when he defines it as “... the reduced social control against
deviant behavior that is due to a disregard of norms and standards [and organizational
values].” However, anomie remained largely outside empirical research in sociology
until Leo Srole (1956) reformulated it into the individual-level construct of anomie (or
“anomia” as he called it). Srole’s (1956, p. 711) anomie generally refers to: “the
individual’s generalized pervasive sense of self-to-others belongingness at one extreme
[eunomia] compared with self-to-others distance and self-to-others alienation at the
other pole of the continuum [anomia]”.
While it is clear that attitudinal dependent variables appear in many research works
of unquestionable rigor and quality, the same cannot be said with regard to the
influence of multi-attitudinal surroundings on OCB. Furthermore, it appears that the
inclusion of anomie as a variable moderating that attitudes-OCB relationship is
unprecedented. In effect, Caruana et al. (2001) include it in a research design as an
independent variable of deviant behaviors (DWB), but not of OCB and, therefore,
without studying the aforementioned moderating effect. Hodson (1999) examines the
OA of leaders, and not of the subordinates, and so analyzes its feed-back effect on
worker resistance to the norms.
In view of that gap in the literature, this research, applied to university
administration and services personnel (ASP), proposes:
.the verification of the negative influence of unfavorable attitudinal surroundings
on OCB; and
.predicts the OA performance as a moderator of the relationship between an
unfavorable attitude environment and OCB (see Figure 1).
Theoretical background
OCB is defined by Organ (1988, p. 4) as:
...the individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the
formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the
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